Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long grass roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern--it only dates back to 1823--and yet it is typical. Two masses of benches on a slightly inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women. Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here on the morning of First Day. Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even thought that this is _dilettante_ agriculture. It is merely evidence that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern transportation methods bring his products to the consumer. Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, this one, like the meeting-house of the Friends back the pike a way, is cursed with modernity. It can only claim sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine host can tell no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after no less a personage. Instead he relates mournfully how a tavern over on the Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap-room telling of the memorable night that the members of the Continental Congress moving from New York to Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anecdotes and a corking name almost make a wayside inn. But the anecdotes are not always easy to find.